What Does It Take to Stop Crips and Bloods From Killing Each Other?

By JOHN BUNTIN

July 10, 2013

I first met Cynthia Mendenhall two hours before the funeral of her nephew, Frank Evans Jr. We were seated in the booth of a Denny’s on the edge of Watts, eight miles south of downtown Los Angeles. I expressed my condolences. She received them with a nod. Her sister-in-law, she said, was taking it hard. In fact, she nearly refused to come to the funeral. Even though it had been almost two weeks since Frank was shot, she still couldn’t accept that he was dead.

Mendenhall could. A 51-year-old mother of four, she had lost two sons to gang warfare in Watts, something she knew well. During the 1980s, Mendenhall was a high-ranking member of the PJ Crips, one of the oldest Crips gangs in Watts. We sat down at a booth, and Mendenhall began to talk.

“Frank was a free spirit, an African-American white boy, a hippie,” she said. “He thought he could go anywhere.” Frank, who was nicknamed “Peace,” was wrong about that.

Gangs in Los Angeles don’t fly their colors the way they used to, but the rivalries persist. In the 1980s, members of the two dominant gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, flaunted their affiliation by dressing in blue (Crips) or red (Bloods), even though doing so made them targets. Today, computer databases, gang injunctions and enhanced criminal sanctions for gang-related crime have driven such obvious, outward expressions of gang affiliation underground. Gang members now wear their colors mainly on YouTube (where they conceal their identities with bandannas) or on special occasions. As a result, a blue or red shirt no longer signifies gang membership in the way that it used to. At least, it’s not supposed to. But when Evans stepped out of a friend’s house wearing blue in a part of South Los Angeles controlled by the Swan Bloods, a member of the gang pedaling past took offense and opened fire on him.

“Now they just found out they shot the wrong person,” Mendenhall said. “They say, ‘Oh, my God, we did not know who he was.’ ” Meaning: they didn’t know about me. Mendenhall is better known in South Los Angeles as Sista Soulja, a name earned in the 1980s when Watts was practically a war zone. (Mendenhall is not to be confused with Sister Souljah, the rapper Bill Clinton made famous on the 1992 campaign trail.)

The code of the streets is clear: You kill one of mine, I’ll kill one of yours. But things have changed in South L.A., somewhat. When Mendenhall’s cellphone rings a half-hour into breakfast, it’s not a PJ Crip calling to plan a counterattack; rather, it’s her favorite police officer, Sgt. Anthony Cato, who grew up near Watts. He’s calling to talk about arrangements for the funeral and the three repasts that will follow it, each of which is occurring in a different part of the city so that mourners from rival gangs won’t have to cross into each other’s territories.

“O.K., O.K., listen to me,” Mendenhall tells him. She then reviews where she wants Cato to deploy his officers — these intersections, this many cars, this close to the church where the service is taking place. She even specifies their gear (“soft tactical,” meaning short-sleeve shirts and a more casual look). The goal is to provide enough of a law-enforcement presence to prevent a drive-by shooting — funerals make for tempting targets — without angering family members by overwhelming the occasion with police officers. Satisfied, Mendenhall tells Cato she’ll see him that afternoon at the repast at Imperial Courts, a 498-unit public-housing project that has long been the PJ Crips’ home base. The Los Angeles Police Department, which for most of Mendenhall’s life has been the enemy, was now working with her — almost for her — to ensure the day was a nonviolent one.

Since 1994, violent crime in the United States has fallen by more than 40 percent. By all accounts, police departments today are more professional, less corrupt and more effective than they were 30 years ago. Yet, for a variety of reasons, minority perceptions of the police have not improved. A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that just 14 percent of African-Americans had a great deal of confidence in the proposition that their local police officers treated blacks and whites equally, compared with 38 percent of whites who thought so.

“The communities that need police protection the most, trust police the least,” John Laub, the former head of the National Institute of Justice, says. “Bridging that divide is the most urgent task for American policing today.” Even the most successful police departments struggle with the perception of racial bias. For example, over the past 20 years, violent crime in New York City has fallen by 80 percent, twice the rate of decline of the nation as a whole. According to the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one way the department has driven crime down is by stopping and questioning (and sometimes frisking) large numbers of people in high-crime areas, thus deterring people from carrying weapons. In 2012, the New York Police Department conducted almost as many stops of black youths as there are black youths in the city, recovering 729 guns in the process.

Nearly 60 percent of white New Yorkers approve of the tactic. Less than a quarter of black New Yorkers share that opinion. Many perceive it as racial profiling, an interpretation bolstered by recent police testimony in a lawsuit filed against the city over the practice. This perception has real-world consequences, says David M. Kennedy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In high-crime neighborhoods across the country, community cooperation with police investigations has virtually stopped. It’s not simply that residents are afraid of retaliation, Kennedy says. “There is a strong and growing norm in many communities, especially poor black communities, that good people don’t talk to and don’t work with the police,” he says. So even while the sheer number of murders in most cities is dropping, the homicide clearance rate — the proportion of cases solved — is doing the same.

Cities grappling with gang violence have long feared one outcome above all others: becoming Los Angeles, and more specifically, Watts. Nowhere were police relations with the black community worse.

The way the L.A.P.D. conducted itself in South Los Angeles “wasn’t policing, it was anti-insurgency run amok,” says the journalist and historian Joe Domanick. “Sheer brutality, suppression and force — those were the only things the L.A.P.D. thought people in South L.A. understood, and those were the only things the L.A.P.D. itself understood.” The rise of the Crips and the Bloods in the 1970s only strengthened that sentiment. Watts, with the highest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi, the fourth-highest concentration of poverty in the city of Los Angeles and a long history of police-community conflict, presented the problem of gang violence and “black-blue” antagonism in its most extreme form.

But Watts and the Los Angeles Police Department have each undergone a remarkable transformation. Over the past two years, violent crime in Watts’s public-housing projects has fallen by more than 60 percent. Drive-by shootings, once a mainstay of gang life and the nightly news, have almost completely disappeared.

Causality is slippery, especially when it comes to crime. The L.A.P.D.’s decision to deploy 30 additional officers to Watts’s three largest housing projects has undoubtedly contributed to the area’s improvement. Research has shown that “hot-spot policing” — flooding high-crime areas with police officers — effectively reduces crime without simply displacing it. But the department’s efforts in Watts go beyond “cops on dots.” In recent years, the L.A.P.D. has been conducting an unusual experiment in community policing in Watts. Its centerpiece, the Community Safety Partnership, is the department’s collaboration with a group of residents known as the Watts Gang Task Force. Every Monday morning, community leaders meet with top police commanders to discuss what’s happening in the Watts gang world — who’s feuding with whom, where criminal investigations stand, which are the issues residents are worried about. What makes the initiative unusual is that many of the task force’s participants have close ties to street gangs. Some, like Mendenhall, are former gang leaders. Others are the mothers and grandmothers of notorious gang leaders past and present.

When we talk about crime, we tend to talk about victims and offenders, innocence and guilt, prey and predator. Gang violence clouds and warps this logic: victims and victimizers are often the same people, and neither side has any reason to talk to the police. This presents a conundrum to law enforcement, one that has developed contrasting strategies on either coast. New York City insists that hard-nosed, divisive tactics like its stop-and-frisk policy are necessary to reduce crime. But Los Angeles has pursued another way, an approach that has delivered lower crime rates and fostered police-community reconciliation.

Cynthia Mendenhall was born in Shreveport, La., in 1962. When she was 3, her mother, Bobbie Sue Mendenhall, moved to Watts, joining the great migration of African-Americans from the South to Southern California, drawn by the promise of factory jobs and lives free of Jim Crow. Mendenhall’s family grew to include seven children, but it did not thrive. By the time the Mendenhalls arrived, the same year as the Watts riots, the factories along Alameda Street that nurtured a generation of black Angelenos were already beginning to close down.

Mendenhall grew up amid the economic and social wreckage of working-class Watts. As a young child, she says, she was routinely molested. Her mother started drinking, then using PCP. By the fourth grade, she was fighting in school. (“Nowadays, it’s the second [grade],” she says. “They are more advanced than we were.”) Mendenhall’s facility with her fists soon attracted the attention of the dominant neighborhood crew, the PJ Crips. At 11, she joined, eventually winning fame throughout the projects as a fighter — even while pregnant.

Then, in the early 1980s, Freeway Rick Ross brought crack cocaine to South L.A. Bloods and Crips gangs, already in charge of the neighborhoods, became distributors. The housing projects of Watts turned into open-air drug markets, their cul-de-sacs and winding roads offering protection from police and rival gangs.

“Everyone had money,” Mendenhall says, an involuntary smile playing across her lips. With the money came cars, guns and an increasingly violent competition for market share. Assault weapons were deployed in drive-by shootings. Gang members routinely shot at outgunned police officers. When the L.A.P.D. tried to open a substation in Imperial Courts, it was vandalized several times, before the department abandoned the effort. The authorities decided it was time to respond with overwhelming force.

In 1988, Daryl F. Gates, who was then police chief, began Operation Hammer. For months, hundreds of officers swept through black neighborhoods on weekends. Every law was enforced. Every infraction became a cause for arrest. Thousands of black Angelenos were arrested each Friday and Saturday for minor offenses and held in the city jail, their cars impounded (and not infrequently stripped of stereos and rims), then released on Monday. The approach was as desperate as it was alienating. One sergeant managing the daily operations was Charlie Beck, now chief of the department.

Beck’s father, George Beck, worked under the legendary William H. Parker, who helped purge the department of corruption. His godfather was Daryl F. Gates. As a teenager growing up in suburban Los Angeles County, Beck dreamed of becoming a professional motocross racer. Instead, in 1975, he became an L.A.P.D. reserve officer, working in the Rampart division around MacArthur Park.

“I found it to be a really good fit,” Beck says. “It’s a physical job, you get to be outside a lot, you get to interact on the front lines of life, and it’s a very, very challenging and satisfying job.” In 1977, he applied for a full-time position and entered the police academy. The following year the department announced that it was opening a station in Watts and creating a new type of unit to fight gang crime, called the Community Response Against Street Hoodlums unit, known as Crash. Beck signed on.

Beck’s Crash unit spent most of its time working around the housing projects in Watts: Imperial Courts, Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs. South Los Angeles was in the midst of a PCP epidemic. Night after night, Beck and his fellow officers responded to radio calls reporting users behaving in manic and unpredictable ways. The encounters often turned violent. Beck and his colleagues would struggle to subdue preternaturally strong perpetrators, many of them nude. (PCP often causes users to feel hot.) Every month, officers were injured. Every month, the volume of calls seemed to go up.

Officers arrested people in droves, but the mayhem only got worse, Beck says. One night, he saw a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed. Another night, a fellow officer died in his arms. Beck felt the job was changing him, making him feel negative and hopeless. In 1981, he asked for a transfer to the less challenging Pacific division. But by 1988, the crack epidemic in full swing, he was back in South Bureau working on Operation Hammer as a gang sergeant.

To Beck, Operation Hammer seemed like the “logical progression” of things. Not until four years later, when riots broke out following the acquittal of the officers involved in the beating of Rodney King, did he realize just how important the consent of the public was. But it would take the arrival of a new police chief and a decade’s time to begin the process of changing the department’s culture.

During the early 1990s, William J. Bratton served as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s first police commissioner, in New York City. Bratton’s successes there made him the most famous lawman in the world. A series of high-profile incidents after Bratton’s departure, however, involving police shootings and the abuse of black men, tarnished the N.Y.P.D.’s reputation. By the time Bratton arrived in Los Angeles in 2002, he had something to prove — namely, that effective policing need not antagonize minority communities. Beck quickly emerged as Bratton’s go-to man for the department’s most challenging problems.

Cynthia Mendenhall, also known as Sista Soulja, is a former gang member who now helps keep the peace.

Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Beck’s first assignment was to restore order to a section of downtown known as Skid Row, which had a large population of transients, homeless people and addicts. Working with the criminologist George Kelling, who developed the “broken windows” concept of policing that was used in New York City in the early 1990s, Beck began to enforce ordinances like the one prohibiting sleeping on sidewalks during the day. The policy was effective at restoring order to the area, but the American Civil Liberties Union opposed it and filed a lawsuit to end the practice. Beck’s next posting was to the troubled Rampart division in central Los Angeles, where reports of rogue officers planting evidence, fabricating testimony and brutalizing gang members triggered a U.S. Justice Department investigation that resulted in federal oversight of the L.A.P.D. as a whole. Beck revamped the division while also uprooting the drug trade in MacArthur Park, home to the Salvadoran gang MS-13. By 2005, crime in Los Angeles was falling. Gang violence, however, remained stubbornly prevalent. What would eventually become a centerpiece of the city’s response was a product of desperation.

In October 2005, a captain named Pat Gannon was transferred from Harbor division to the 77th Street division, just northwest of Watts. The following month, a student was wounded in a midday drive-by shooting. It was nothing unusual — until the retaliatory shootings began. Over the course of the next four hours, there were 20 shootings. The evening promised to be even worse. In just a few hours, Dorsey High School and Crenshaw High School would play their first nighttime football game against each other in years. The two schools were known for their intense rivalry, one that wasn’t limited to football. Crenshaw was in Crips territory; Dorsey was in Bloods territory. Fearful of what might happen, Gannon requested about 200 additional personnel. Despite the massive police deployment, there was a drive-by shooting near the football game, followed by a related shooting involving a police officer. Gannon decided to reach out to a group of people that L.A.P.D. had long viewed with suspicion — gang-intervention workers.

Gang peacemakers had worked the streets of South L.A. since before the Rodney King riots. Some were volunteers; some worked for small nonprofit groups. Gang conflicts often emerged from disputes over girls, reported slights or simple misunderstandings. Gang-intervention workers would relay accurate information to gang members, resolving issues before they led to violence. That was the theory, at least. Many police officers were skeptical, perhaps because so many gang-intervention workers were themselves ex-gang members. Some hadn’t really left the gangs. But during his time at Harbor division, Gannon saw firsthand how gang interventionists could shut gang feuds down. With nothing to lose, he made some phone calls and asked for help. A week later, he found himself sitting down to talk with “30 hard-core gang guys” in a church basement in South L.A.

The first meeting was a grievance session. The second meeting, the same. At the third, Gannon finally spoke up. “We’ve had eight homicides in two weeks, four on the L.A. side, four in the city of Inglewood,” he said. “I just had a double murder the day before yesterday. I need help in stopping that. I have to stop that feud. Can you help me with this particular problem?”

Discussion ensued. The gang-intervention workers said there were people with whom they might talk. “That day it stopped,” Gannon says. “Not slowed down; it stopped.”

Gannon had tapped into something powerful, a concept academics call procedural justice. The idea is rooted in research about court outcomes conducted by the Yale Law School professor Tom Tyler in the early 1990s. Tyler found that people care more about how they are treated than about actual legal outcomes. By explaining statutes and court procedures clearly and by allowing parties to present their grievances more freely, Tyler says, courts could significantly increase satisfaction with judges’ rulings, as well as compliance with court orders.

Other researchers expanded Tyler’s work to other parts of the criminal-justice system. In the process, they began to examine a much older concept: legitimacy. “Why do we obey the law?” asks Tracey Meares, a Yale Law School professor and a leader in this field. The answer to that question, it turns out, is not just because we think we are going to be punished if we don’t. Meares’s research showed that even felons care about and respond to perceptions of fairness. In the mid-1990s, a program started in Boston, Operation Ceasefire, demonstrated that a concerted effort to reduce youth violence that combined focused deterrence (identifying gang members and warning them that future violence would result in swift, certain and severe punishment) and fairness (offering gang members alternatives and opportunities if they refrained from using guns to resolve disputes) could significantly reduce gun violence. Since then many other cities have duplicated Boston’s results using similar strategies. But while many law-enforcement agencies have come to appreciate the power of deterrence, many ignore the importance of fairness.

The stop-and-frisk approach in New York City puts a priority on deterrence over fairness, Meares says. The purpose behind stop-and-frisk is to deter youths in high-crime neighborhoods from carrying guns by increasing the likelihood that they will interact with the police. The N.Y.P.D. approach may be effective theoretically, Meares says, but it comes with high costs. The police must make large numbers of stops in order to make the threat of being stopped credible — that’s expensive. And, to the extent that communities view such tactics as unfair, the police lose legitimacy.

“There is a direct link between the feeling that police are illegitimate and high levels of violence,” said David M. Kennedy, who helped design Operation Ceasefire. “When you get into the communities that are the most distressed, the feeling that the police are not legitimate goes up and violence goes up.” (In New York a recent curtailing of stop-and-frisk has, in fact, coincided with a decline in homicides.) If academic theories of legitimacy are correct, the police can encourage high-crime neighborhoods to comply with the law by making some fairly simple changes to their own behavior: by explaining police actions, by listening to people’s grievances and by demonstrating respect. In principle, it’s straightforward. But it would take another tragedy to bring this understanding to Watts.

When Branden Bullard, known as Baby Loc, the head of a crew of Grape Street Crips, was shot in the face at 9:40 a.m. on Christmas morning 2005, everyone knew there would be consequences. The first Blood to die was shot within an hour. In the months that followed, a violent feud between Bounty Hunter Bloods and Grape Street Crips led to more than 20 shootings and at least 8 deaths. (Bullard actually survived the initial shooting, but he was killed at a party a few years later.) The level of violence prompted the office of Janice Hahn, a city councilwoman who represented the area, to create a new community group: the Watts Gang Task Force.

What they created is no ordinary neighborhood watch. Its president is Betty Day, a Grape Street resident and the mother of the legendary Grape Street Crips gang member Wayne Day. Another prominent member, the Rev. Maudlin Clark, has grandchildren involved in a violent Crips “click” known as the Fudgetown Mafia. Yet every week, the L.A.P.D. makes a point of sitting down with the parents and grandparents of the people they are trying to arrest. It’s a strange, symbiotic relationship, with each side eager for information on the other’s next move.

The task force also includes a transformed Mendenhall, who successfully made the switch from gang member to peacemaker. She became disenchanted with the gang life in the late ’80s, found her calling in community activism and was elected president of the Imperial Courts residents’ council. She started meeting with politicians; a feud with Representative Maxine Waters about Mendenhall’s plan to start a charter school in Imperial Courts attracted favorable attention from local Republicans. But shaking hands with politicians while also selling dope was a tricky business, particularly when, as occurred on one occasion, a customer tried to buy some product at a political event.

“I made the decision to walk away from everything,” Mendenhall says. In Watts, that isn’t so simple.

Anthony (Little Tony) Owens was Mendenhall’s second child, born in 1981. “Such a pretty boy,” she says. “He got along with everybody.” She made a point of showing him and his younger brother, Darrian, as much of the world as she could. “I took them to everybody’s community,” she says proudly. “They weren’t hoodbound.”

But on Aug. 31, 2006, while standing outside Imperial Courts, Owens was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting carried out by the Carver Park Compton Crips. He wasn’t the intended victim.

Paramedics raced Owens to nearby St. Francis hospital, but by the time Mendenhall arrived, he was dead. By then a large and volatile group of PJ Crips, Grape Street Crips and Bounty Hunter Bloods had gathered at the hospital. The mood of the crowd was murderous. Mendenhall decided not to announce her son’s death. Instead, she went to the waiting room and asked everyone to gather for a prayer vigil at Imperial Courts the following morning. There she announced that her son had died and pleaded with the crowd not to seek revenge. The police honored her as a peacemaker, providing a motorcycle escort to the funeral (and a protective presence at a repast afterward). Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended the service.

Three months later, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, sheriff’s deputies spotted Darrian driving near Imperial Courts in a brand-new Dodge Charger, a preferred car among gang members. The deputies turned on their flashers. Darrian, who had an illegal handgun in his car, sped off to a nearby senior-housing development, where Mendenhall had a job as a property manager. Once he got to the housing development, during a struggle with the police and in front of his mother, Darrian pulled the gun and shot himself in the head.

“That was when I stared into the face of the devil,” she says.

The crowd outside heard the shot and concluded that the police had killed him. By the time Capt. Rick Jacobs, who was assigned to the Watts area, arrived at the scene, a crowd was pelting the sheriff’s deputies and L.A.P.D. with rocks and bottles. It could have easily escalated into a riot. Jacobs asked Mendenhall to go outside and explain what happened. She walked out and told the crowd that her son had killed himself. The rock-throwing stopped; the crowd dispersed. The cycle of violence started by Owens’s killing stopped.

In 2006, Beck became deputy chief for South Bureau, responsible for the safety of all of South Los Angeles. Working with the civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, he developed a plan to train, certify and deploy gang-intervention workers to the city’s hot spots. Mayor Villaraigosa rolled out a new approach to dealing with gang violence. Villaraigosa spent $21 million of his office’s budget a year on the city’s Gang Reduction and Youth Development program. Schools in neighborhoods with the highest gang presence, including Watts, now systematically identify the most at-risk children for extra services; gang-intervention workers receive city financing; and the city provides summer activities through its Summer Night Lights programs, which keeps parks and recreation centers open later in high-crime neighborhoods.

In 2009, after seven years as chief of the L.A.P.D., Bratton announced that he was resigning and moving to the private sector. Villaraigosa tapped Beck to be his successor, to the applause of people who were once the department’s biggest critics. “Beck is not the Crash officer I met 20 years ago,” Rice says. “He transformed himself; for very strategic but also personal reasons he transformed himself.” Among the personal reasons Rice cites are Beck’s children: two of his three children are in the L.A.P.D. Both work South L.A.

Crime has fallen for the past 10 years in Los Angeles. In Watts, violent crime is down nearly 30 percent since 2011. But it’s not just Watts. Angelenos are now as safe as New Yorkers, statistically speaking, despite the fact that L.A. has just under two-thirds as many police officers per capita as New York City. Moreover, a 2009 survey showed that 83 percent of Angelenos believe that the department is doing a good or excellent job, and majorities of every major ethnic group in the city said that most L.A.P.D. officers treat them with respect.

“Sometimes you got to pinch yourself,” says Mendenhall, who is now a gang-intervention worker employed by the city. “It’s like a dream.” Not for all parties, though.

Like South L.A. as a whole, Watts and its public-housing developments are now predominantly Latino. Many of its residents live in fear of gang violence, says Arturo Ybarra, who heads the Watts/Century Latino Organization. Many Latino newcomers have been attacked, abused or intimidated, he says.

In June of 2012, Mauro Cortez, who moved to L.A. from rural Mexico, was standing on a corner, wearing a purple T-shirt a friend had given him. “I own a Honda,” the shirt said. “Be nice to me.”

As the sun was setting, a teenager in a dark hoodie pedaled by and shot him, wounding Cortez, who was holding his 14-month-old son, Angel. Angel didn’t survive the shooting. Word on the street was that a Fudgetown Mafia shooter had mistaken Cortez for a member of the Watts Varrio Grape Street gang, who wear purple. At an emergency meeting of the Watts Gang Task Force, Capt. Phil Tingirides appealed for help in finding a suspect. The mood was tense. Latinos sat on one side of the room, African-Americans on the other. God was invoked. The media were denounced for playing up black-brown tension. Pastor Clark delivered a speech saying that no one should jump to the conclusion that Fudgetown Mafia was involved.

Asked if the community provided information to help solve the case, one detective just laughed. “None,” he said. Shortly later the police did get a tip from a neighbor about someone burning a hoodie, which helped lead to the arrest of a 15-year-old member of the Fudgetown Mafia. He was convicted and sentenced last month.

John Buntin covers law enforcement for Governing magazine. He is the author of “L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City.”